Who Made That Ski Lift?

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CreditSusan Biddle/The Denver Post, via Getty Images

By Daniel Engber

Feb. 21, 2014

“It is essential,” wrote the railway magnate William Averell Harriman in a telegram dated April 15, 1936, “. . . to develop a method of lifting skiers 2,000 feet above the valley floor.” For America’s first ski resort — Idaho’s Sun Valley — Harriman wanted a new approach to moving skiers up the slopes that would be more comfortable than the pulls and hoists that had come before. So he posed the problem to his staff at the Union Pacific office in Omaha.

One of the railway’s young bridge designers, James Curran, had an idea. At an earlier job, the self-taught engineer and former pool hustler designed a wire-based system for moving bales of bananas from the United Fruit loading docks in Honduras onto waiting boats. Curran thought the same approach would work for people, if the fruit hooks were replaced with chairs.

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Skiers had long relied on makeshift tows and hoists. Early sportsmen co-opted mine equipment, grabbing hold of ore buckets that were tied to a rope-and-pulley system. The first mechanical lifts made exclusively for skiers opened in the early 1900s, including one powered by a horse and another by a waterwheel. As skiing grew more popular, the technology advanced: By the early 1930s, the Canadian Alex Foster had designed a towing device powered by a Dodge car on blocks, with the cable wrapped around one of its wheel rims.

But these early systems would drag people up a hill, either upright on their skis or sitting in a toboggan. The ropes could be slippery and heavy, and they had a tendency to twist. Riding the tows was sometimes difficult or dangerous. In the mid-1930s, a Swiss engineer set the rope overhead, with a J-shaped bar hanging down so that a skier could position himself against the bar and let it push him along. Curran’s design actually lifted the skiers off the ground. To test its feasibility, he attached a chair to the side of a pickup truck. A skier wearing roller skates practiced jumping on and off as the truck drove slowly past.

By 1936, Curran’s chairlifts — the world’s first — were installed at Sun Valley. The first double chairlift, with two seats side-by-side, opened in 1946, followed by triple and quad models in the early 1960s. “People were marveling over how well the chairlifts worked,” says Kirby Gilbert, a ski historian.

Chairlifts didn’t take over completely, though. Rope tows, J bars and T-bars were still the cheapest options. Some high-end resorts installed cable cars or gondolas. In the late 1930s, a “Skimobile” opened in New Hampshire, in which riders sat in what looked like roller coaster cars, spaced 40 feet apart on an oval track. But by the 1960s and 1970s, Gilbert says, the chairlift had become an industry standard: “It hit the sweet spot of cost and comfort.”